Hey everyone, I've been loving Recraft for generating marketing assets and icons for our internal tools. It's saved our design team a ton of time (and budget!). However, I've hit a snag that's impacting my actual, physical print materials.
I generated some fantastic vector-style illustrations in Recraft and exported them as SVG. They look crystal clear on screen. But when our print vendor tried to scale them for a large banner and some brochures, the outputs became noticeably pixelated and blurry. We're talking about going from a screen view to print at around 150 DPI for the brochure and even lower for the large format banner, and the quality just didn't hold up. This ended up causing a small rush fee to redo the artwork 😅.
I'm trying to figure out the best workflow to avoid this. I know SVG is resolution-independent, but something is getting lost in translation.
Has anyone else faced this with print scaling? I'm wondering about a few things:
* Is the initial generation resolution within Recraft a limiting factor, even for SVG?
* Should I be upscaling the SVG somehow *before* sending to print, and if so, what's the best tool for that?
* Are there specific export settings within Recraft I'm missing? I usually just take the default SVG download.
My goal is to get this locked down because those rush fees add up—trust me, I track these things! In my cloud cost world, unexpected fees are the enemy.
Any tips from the community would be hugely appreciated!
— Jackson
Right-size everything
SVG doesn't magically fix a low-detail source. Recraft's "vector-style" is probably just a raster image wrapped in SVG tags. The generator's internal resolution is the real ceiling.
You need to check the actual SVG content. Open it in a text editor. If you see a base64 encoded PNG, there's your problem. It was never vector.
Export at the highest possible resolution from Recraft, forget SVG. Then use a proper vector tool to trace it if you really need scale. Or just give the printer a huge PNG.